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Comment by silverbluep | Hacker News Reader

I have been using droid-ify on GrapheneOS for a few years now; because F-Droid ui is terrible, and the privilege extention has been such a pain to configure and get working without issues on my previous lineageOS phone. Happy to see this major overhaul; and i'm glad the FPE is being phased out.

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I think it is great that there are multiple clients out there, so people have a choice of user experience. One thing that I think is too often overlooked look is if they have implemented the same security and privacy standards as F-Droid, if that's important to you. For example, last I checked, the third party clients where still using index-v1, which is signed using SHA1. Maybe NeoStore updated to index-v2? And there is also quite a bit of effort put into the client-side to make sure it leaks as little as possible to the servers. There are libraries of the official core pieces for third party clients to use to gain many of these protections: https://f-droid.org/2023/05/02/three-client-libraries.html

They could always close off access claiming ai scraping. If reddit shut their api down now instead of back then they could have also blamed ai and no one would’ve been mad.

Why would Fdroid do that? They even package and offer some of these alternate clients in their own repository.

>I have been using droid-ify

After 10 years of F-droid, I'm bummed I only found droid-ify a couple of months ago. Sooo much better than F-droid.

Check out Neostore too. You'll love it.

There's also Aurora Droid, last time I checked.

I tried Neostore. All the info it shows is pretty cool, but ultimately I felt the expierence suffered from all the extra information shown compared to the simpler UI in Droid-ify.

I love Neo Store, because in my book complex > simple. Simplicity of interface = process handcuffs most of the time (IMO). Complexity done right permits so much diversity in composability. I would never ever want a 'simpler' After Effects or GIMP or Blender or Siemens NX. GNOME did it back with GNOME 3 and it has been trash in my book ever since! vomitface.gif

Sometim... err more times than not... there should be a "Your IQ must be at least this high" bar for good software. Stop appealing to the lower common denominators!

I run into UI glitches and crashes, and decide to not continue using it.

There's also F-Droid Classic. For me Droid-ify never felt quite right + it never worked properly with unattended updates, for me at least.

Thank you. Used it to uninstall F-droid and roll back to v1 after trying out this new update (ooof... full-blown material ui is not for me. Those progress bars, oh my eyes!)

The old f-droid client made selecting app updates easy. With both v2 and droid-ify, you have to click through for each app. Not a great interface decision :( Why do updates always dumb interfaces down these days?

What do you mean by "click through for each app"?

Why limit yourself only to F-Droid when in APK Updater you can have APKMirror, Aptoide, F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid, APKPure, GitLab and GitHub?

https://github.com/rumboalla/apkupdater

I don't really need app to discover other apps, I need app to install/update the apps I already know.

agree, droid-ify is very clean, been using it for 5 years now

Me too. But more and more I am using ObtainX now and installing from Github sources. I don't need F-Droid's gatekeeping.

I remember Obtainium being PITA to set up, is there any benefit in ObtainX over APKUpdater from rumboalla? Seems to have way more sources.

https://github.com/rumboalla/apkupdater

I wasn't aware of that app. I will check that one out too.

FYI the obtainx sources current list is: Fdroid, Fdroid 3rd party, Forgejo(Codeberg), GitHub, GitLab, IzzyOnDroid, CoolApk, Tencent App Store, vivo App Store (CN).

I only ever used Github so far.

So "Fdroid, Fdroid 3rd party, Forgejo(Codeberg), GitHub, GitLab, IzzyOnDroid, CoolApk, Tencent App Store, vivo App Store (CN)"

"APKMirror, Aptoide, F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid, APKPure, GitLab and GitHub"

so 3 chinese app stores vs APKMirror, APKPure and Aptoide, I think I'd trust more APKM over the rest, personally I update only from Github/Fdroid and APKPure/Aptoide I have disabled

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